With topical writing from the 1740s of and about the charismatic itinerant preacher George Whitefield as a focus, this talk will range across polemic, sortilege, discipline, cards-playing, election, gratitude, and ribald jokes about Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man. It will also attempt to model the virtues of book studies as a method, from macro attention to sociological theories of publishing to micro study of variants in the material text. Its vantage on post-secularism will be, at one prospect, to historicize the emergence of secularism by way of evangelicalism and, at another, to discuss the status of post-secular intellectuals as they take up their object of inquiry.

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